IN PERSON | Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project (CWTEP)

Spirits at Stowe

Lecture with Beth Caruso

October 21, 2023

Join Connecticut author Beth M. Caruso as she discusses the witch trials in colonial Connecticut. Her well-researched novel, One of Windsor: The Untold Story of America’s First Witch Hanging, is based on the life of Alice ‘Alse’ Young, the first colonial hanging victim. She explores certain events in Windsor and elsewhere in Connecticut that led to the indictments and deaths of at least eleven people between 1647 and 1663. Beth will also recount the process of passing Resolution HJ 34 in the Connecticut General Assembly in May 2023 as well as its pertinence for modern witch hunt victims in over sixty countries in present-day. She is more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

Her second book, The Salty Rose: Alchemists, Witches & A Tapper In New Amsterdam (publishing date: September 2019), is a sequel to One of Windsor and further explores some of the witch trial issues of the period. Copies of both of Beth’s books will be available for purchase and signing. Come and meet the author! She wants to meet you too!

Award-winning author, Beth M Caruso, has been involved in efforts to educate the public about the Connecticut witch trials through her written work and exoneration efforts.

Beth’s first historical novel is One of Windsor: The Untold Story of America’s First Witch Hanging (2015), which tells the tale of Alice ‘Alse’ Young and the beginnings of New England’s colonial witch trials. The Salty Rose: Alchemists, Witches & A Tapper In New Amsterdam (2019) won the literary prize in Genre Fiction (2020) from IPNE (Independent Publishers of New England). It explores John Winthrop the Younger’s influence on stopping the witch trials in Connecticut and gives an insider’s view of the takeover of the Dutch colony of New Netherland and the Hartford Witch Panic. Most recently, Beth co-authored “Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647-1693.” which appeared in the Fall 2022 edition of Connecticut History Review (61:2) with historian, Dr. Katherine Hermes. Her new novel, a sequel to One of Windsor, titled Between Good & Evil: Curse of the Windsor Witch’s Daughter, is coming out in winter 2023-24.

Since 2015, Beth has been educating the public about the Connecticut witch trials through lectures, articles, and social media. She has been advocating for exoneration through websites and collaborations. In 2016, she co-founded CT WITCH Memorial with Tony Griego to raise awareness about the witch trials before obtaining exoneration for trial victims Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert in Windsor in 2017. She is also a co-founder of the CT Witch Trial Exoneration Project that helped to pass Resolution HJ 34 in the Connecticut General Assembly in May 2023 to acknowledge Connecticut’s witch trial victims.

Visit Beth’s:

Website | Email | Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram

Location Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Katharine Seymour Day House

Doors Open 4:15 pm

Program 4:30 - 6:00 pm

School Group Interest Form

School Group Interest Form 2023

Thank you so much for your interest in a group tour at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center! Please help us schedule your visit by answering the questions below.

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Isabella Beecher Hooker

Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker (1822-1907)
An ardent member of the woman’s suffrage movement, Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker joined in the cause along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Isabella was the first child of Lyman Beecher and his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher.

Isabella began her education at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary and lived with her sister Mary Perkins. In 1841 she married John Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. John Hooker was a lawyer and an abolitionist.

In the early 1860s Isabella got involved in the woman’s suffrage movement. Isabella joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a member of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1869. She was a founding member of the Connecticut Woman’s Suffrage Association. Isabella’s ideas of equality were influenced by John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty and the Subjection of Women.

In 1871, Isabella organized the annual convention of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in Washington D.C. and presented her argument before the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. Her husband, John Hooker, believed in his wife and supported her activities. He helped Isabella draft a bill to the Connecticut Legislature giving married women the same property rights as their husbands. The bill passed in 1877. Isabella annually submitted a bill granting women the right to vote, but it did not pass in her lifetime.